Really Real Widowed Mental Health Post

This is a post that blurs the lines.

See, there’s a thing called widow brain.  It’s the grief fog that happens during shock, where suddenly your memory turns to pudding.  It’s more than just memory though.  You feel like you’re existing in air that’s as thick as sludge.  Every thought and action takes 20 times longer because you have to overthink it to make it happen, but at the same time, in my case, I was in full blown mania mode just to exist so my brain was both sped up and slowed down in the same instant.

Widow brain.

Then, 8 months after Parker died I started on a new medication that has mental side effects.  It takes my words and slows my brain down and causes memory problems.

PTSD also causes memory problems and the years leading up to and ending in Parker’s death caused all kinds of PTSD symptoms.

So, my memory was so bad that I actually went to a memory specialist because I was worried.

But it turned out to just be a combination of all of the above, which is a lot.  I spent a lot of my day feeling like I was fighting through a fog.  That itself created a lot of anxiety because I felt like everyone could see how slowly I was thinking.

I still fight to remember a lot of words, almost every blog post requires at least one trip to Google to look up the definition of a word to make sure I’m recalling the right one.  Other times words are just not there, luckily I can get my point across.

Today though,  I was reading something a friend posted and I had a realization, at some point in the last few months, the fog lifted.

Widow brain is gone.  The slowness feels like it’s gone.  I still have some days where it comes back but for the most part my memory is better and the overall feeling that came with that, the sludge that I constantly fought my way through, feels like it’s cleared.

I’m not really sure when the change happened.  I’m not sure if it was gradual or immediate.  But probably gradual since I didn’t notice it.

I still have lots of times that I tell the same story twice, or where I feel like I already wrote this post (and maybe I have) and my long term memory is better than my short, but that’s just who I am.

Also, I leave the stove on WAY too often because I have ADHD and try to do too many things at once.  (I just cleaned a scorched pan from that a few days ago.)

But widow brain is gone.  It helps me realize how real it was when I look back at how much I had to fight to do simple things.

I will have a much better chance at school without that fog.